From: Monte Davis 

"Mark Hessey"  wrote:

>That Bush chose to boil it down to WMD in his talking points instead of
>continually promoting an unwieldy littany of reasons does not in fact reduce
>the reason to that single aspect.

This is precisely where we differ, Mark. I think Bush had a variety of
GENUINE reasons -- but knew they were not enough, all put together, to
carry Congress and the people with him. So he added a bogus one to put it
over the top. You call that "boiling it down to WMD." I call it a
cynical scare tactic.

> What does al Quada specifically have to do with it? I'm talking about the
> greater good of shutting down the terrorist mind-set sooner, and over there
> instead of over here, than later.

I've just looked again at Powell's UN presentation of last February again,
and roughly 95% was devoted to alleging that Iraq had WMDs and that it had
ties not to "the terrorist mind-set,"  but specifically to Al
Qaeda. I'd kinda hoped he was making the best case possible; since you now
dismissed those two points as sideshows, it's a damn shame you weren't
there to set him straight.

In other words, having seen the collapse of the two most prominent and
compelling arguments offered from summer 2002 into March 2003, you now
substitute "shutting down the terrorist mind-set" -- a rationale
so broad and vague and gaseous that it can justify attacking any country
anywhere anytime.

There's a phrase for that: "bait and switch."

-Monte

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5